Brownstones

Brownstone is a brown Triassic or Jurassic sandstone which was once a popular building material. The term Brownstones is also used in the United States to refer to a terraced house (rowhouse) clad in this material.

Brownstowns Show

Brownstone dwellings
There are many brownstones throughout numerous New York City neighborhoods, especially in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Park Slope, Fort Greene, Cobble Hill, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn Heights, and Bedford Stuyvesant. The Manhattan neighborhood of the Upper West Side, too, retains many brownstones. New York City brownstones are highly desired, and usually cost several million dollars to purchase.
In Chicago, a brownstone typically refers to a free-standing house, originally built for a single family, clad in brownstone. While many Chicago brownstones have subsequently been split into multiple rental or condominium units, many others remain single-family homes. These Brownstones houses attract the young and newlyweds. Due to varieties in stone color, some Chicago dwellings are called "graystones".
Due to urban renewal, brownstones are developing in Detroit as well.
Rex Stout's fictional detective Nero Wolfe lives in a luxurious and comfortable New York City brownstone on West 35th Street. (There are no actual brownstones in that part of New York.)
In the television show I Love Lucy (1951–1957), the Ricardos lived in a converted brownstone apartment building on New York's East 68th Street owned by their friends the Mertzes.
In the Audrey Hepburn classic Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), much of the action took place in her brownstone apartment building.
On the popular American television program The Cosby Show (1984–1992), the affluent Huxtable family, the show's central characters, lived in a Brooklyn brownstone.
In the 2001 horror movie Bones starring Snoop Dogg as a murdered gangster turned vengeful spirit, his character resided in a gothic style brownstone that became a haunted decayed ruin and the main Brownstones setting of the film.
Carrie Bradshaw, the protagonist of Sex and the City, resided in a brownstone at a fictitious Upper East Side address in New York City.
On Sesame Street, Gordon Robinson and his wife Susan own the brownstone 123 Sesame Street, and are the landlords to Bert and Ernie.
The term brownstone may also be used as slang for heroin, particularly in the United States; "Mr. Brownstone" is a Guns N' Roses song about heroin use. This could be related to brownstone neighborhoods in Harlem where dealers were likely to live, as in the lyrics of the Velvet Underground song, "I'm Waiting for the Man." An alternate origin could be the tan-brown color that powdered heroin often comes in the form of.

Notable types of brownstone
Apostle Island brownstone
In the 19th century Basswood Island was the site of a quarry run by the Bass Island Brownstone Company which operated from 1868 into the 1890s. The brownstone from this and other Apostle Islands quarries was in great demand, and brownstone from Basswood Island was used in the construction of the first Milwaukee County Courthouse in the 1860s.

Hummelstown brownstone
Hummelstown brownstone is extremely popular along the East Coast of the United States of America, with numerous government buildings from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, and Delaware being faced entirely with the stone. The Brownstones comes from the Hummelstown Quarry in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, a small town outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The Hummelstown Quarry is the largest provider of brownstone on the east coast. Typically the stone was transported out of Hummelstown through the Brownstone and Middletown Railroad or taken by truck up to the Erie Canal.

Portland brownstone
Portland brownstone is another popular brownstone. The Brownstones from quarries located in Portland, Connecticut and other nearby localities was used in a number of landmark buildings in Chicago, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, New Haven, Connecticut, and Hartford, Connecticut.